Pollster Nate Silver is floating a provocative theory: President Trump might leave the White House before his term ends.
Speaking on a podcast this week as Republicans digest their midterm losses, Silver discussed potential 2028 Republican candidates and offered his take on where Trump stands.
Silver argued that Republicans made a deal with the devil in Trump, saying the president has sucked the oxygen away from everyone else in the party.
“That’s part of why I had just a weird intuition that maybe Trump will find some pretense to quit,” Silver said.
Silver added that Trump effectively has no leverage left at home, arguing that the president has lost his “fear factor.”
The comments come as many view Tuesday’s results as a rebuke of the MAGA movement and begin to ask who will lead the Republican ticket in 2028. With two years left in Trump’s term, potential contenders such as Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are already the subject of intense speculation.
It’s not the first time Silver has predicted trouble for the president. In an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein released days before the election, Silver said that if the midterms went the way the polls suggested, it would in some ways mark the end of the Trump era.
At the time, he said Trump would still be president for two more years but would become a “super-lame duck” once the 2028 campaign began. He also suggested the country could be on the verge of something larger than a generational turnover in congressional power.
The White House pushed back on that earlier prediction. Spokesman Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast that underestimating Trump and his administration has proven experts and pollsters wrong every time.
The polls Silver referenced proved largely accurate. Democrats won control of both the House and Senate on Tuesday, giving them subpoena power and the ability to block much of Trump’s agenda.
Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of the Silver Bulletin Substack, is no stranger to calling on presidents to step aside. In 2024, he urged President Joe Biden to resign and hand the presidency to Vice President Kamala Harris.
There is no indication that Trump plans to leave office early. Since the election, the president has said he believes he can work with Democrats and has stood by members of his Cabinet facing criticism.
